Join Columbia's Harriman Institute for a lecture exploring the complexities of countering hybrid warfare in Ukraine without limiting freedom of speech.

Within the past few years, the Ukrainian authorities have been heavily criticized by international watchdogs and independent observers for some legal steps and practical policies that allegedly curtail freedom of speech and access to information in the country. The government and its supporters argue, however, that the policies are justified by the actual situation of war waged by the neighboring Russia against Ukraine and have nothing to do with a censorship in a conventional sense but, rather, represents a defensive measure against the enemy’s propaganda, subversion, and provocative disinformation. The debate represents a particular case of a broader controversy between the demand for unrestrained freedom of speech indispensable for modern democracy and the need of those very democracies to protect themselves from the rogue individuals, groups, and regimes that increasingly learned how to weaponize media and (dis)information for their malevolent goals.

Speaker:

Mykola Riabchuk, Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Political and Nationalities’ Studies at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine